Have you heard of Everyclick.com? The premise is that it is a search engine that enables you to support your favourite charities, just by using it in place of your regular search engine. I had already heard of it vaguely, but I went and took a proper look today after reading about the PR brief (registration required) given to Edelman and Geronimo. The brief includes:

driving traffic to the site, recruiting new users and establishing the credibility of the brand with charities, business, the education sector and the public.

Naturally, the first thing I did was turn to my normal search engine and search for everyclick. That’s strange. Results from press releases from a search marketing agency, a charity news site, a couple of forums (mainly wondering why they aren’t in the search results) and lots of charities advocating using them.

Now, they appear not to be particularly hot on the difference between a 301 and a 302 redirect and they obviously don’t have an awful lot of unique content (their search results are most of the content and these are provided by Ask). They are also a competitor of Google’s. But surely they would appear higher than 55th (where I’m currently seeing them) for their own name…?

They don’t even rank in the top 100 results for a search for their homepage’s exact title tag: welcome to everyclick.com the search engine that helps charity. Duplicate content problems are killing them here: the top result is www.amnesty.org.uk/goto.asp?BannerID=137 which 302 redirects to a duplicate of the regular everyclick homepage on the everyclick.com domain. Ouch!

I know that Google doesn’t particularly want other search engines ranking willy nilly. But ranking for their own name should be OK - the other search engines rank for theirs: yahoo, live, ask. I don’t therefore think that it would be a manual penalty (although you could claim they are a thin-affiliate site, at least they are a reasonably high quality one and are also doing it for a good cause).

I think the story here is two-fold:

1. why does Google not trust everyclick? (The other search engines mainly do: Live, Yahoo, Ask - even though Ask manage to rank a redirection page instead of the main everyclick page: dx.doi.org/10.1574/everyclick)
2. what could Everyclick do about it?

Everyclick could carry out their marketing in a much more search engine savvy manner

I think the main problem is that they are being penalised by Google at the moment for duplicate content problems. They have gone out with a (no-doubt-expensive) PR campaign and got mentioned on a load of powerful charity domains. The problem from Google’s point of view is that these pages look very much like pre-sell pages - with lightly rehashed press release content - and they tend to link to duplicate content on the everyclick.com site. Because this strategy has worked so well, they have ended up effectively competing with some very powerful charity domains to prove that they are actually the originator of this content - not helped by having 302 redirects from very powerful domains to duplicate content on their own site (see Amnesty International example above).

So here’s a piece of free advice: pages like this should either be kept out of Google’s way with a robots.txt entry or (better) redirected to the home page once the target charity has been noted or (even better but more work) turned into real pages about ‘Everyclick for Amnesty International’ or ‘Everyclick for the Woodland Trust’ with actual content about helping those charities and linking back to the homepage with some good internal anchor text.

I hate to see charities wasting money

I’m sure the PR campaign they are undertaking is bringing them a return - they seem to be getting great coverage at the moment. But I think it could be made an awful lot more effective by improving their search engine friendliness a little…

If nothing else, improving their standing with Google would enable them to spend a lot less on AdWords - they are having to buy their way into all their branded searches at the moment. As the PR campaign increases their visibility, there are only going to be more of these. Wouldn’t it be nice to get them for free?

Disclaimer: We do not currently work with Everyclick, though if anyone there is reading this, and you want to take our advice, we’d love to get some credit…!

Rand recently wrote at SEOmoz about applying the lessons of ‘Good to Great’ to their business. Good to Great (UK amazon link - different cover) is a book by Jim Collins that seeks to determine the differentiating factors separating ‘great’ companies from ‘good’ companies.

Rand starts by explaining how he generally hates:

management books, business theory books, success coaching and nearly everything that starts with the phrase “The XYZ Habits of Highly Effective…”

but that he was persuaded because of who had recommended it to him (including Avinash, author of Web Analytics, An Hour a Day, that we have been giving away recently).

I’m generally the other way round - I read business and management books pretty voraciously (along with quite a lot of biographies and auto-biographies of people I admire). A great recommendation is always a good starting point, however - so I’m going to pick up a copy the next time I’m in a bookshop (I’m going to buy it from an offline bookshop because I have some book tokens to spend - I wish Amazon accepted book tokens!).

Nevertheless, despite not having read the book, Rand’s post got me thinking about applications of the theory to Distilled (especially as he asked for other people’s views on the application to their own business after he shared so much of his view of how SEOmoz is doing).

The factors contributing to the overall success on the road to ‘greatness’, according to Collins are:

• Level 5 Leadership - this is all about having the right set of skills and attributes at the top, including humility, ambition for the company rather than personal ambition and the resolve to confront tough problems
• First Who, Then What - hiring people because they are great rather than necessarily they are the right shaped peg for the current hole in the business
• Confronting Brutal Facts - ruling by the numbers and being incredibly well-informed about how the business is doing
• The Hedgehog Concept (I have no idea why it’s called that!) - focussing single-mindedly on a single core competency at which they can be better than anyone in the world
• A Culture of Discipline - everyone throughout the organisation going above and beyond the call of duty for the company - the opposite of watching the clock and doing whatever you need just to get by
• The Flywheel - a great analogy whereby there is not necessarily a “eureka moment” when everything comes together, but rather a continuing effort gets the wheel spinning faster and faster until success begins to flow from that and the momentum starts to take on a power of its own

The following analysis of Distilled against these factors is based on the PDF worksheet found via the SEOmoz article.

Level 5 Leadership

Leadership is something that has always worried me in terms of building a great business. On the basketball court, I’ve always been the defensive hustler leading through swung elbows and obsessive backing up of team-mates rather than the captain or leading scorer. Seeing parallels between sport and business as I always do, this worried me. Could I lead a team of people to great results? Duncan has had a similar sporting record (with a little more skill and hand-eye co-ordination, and perhaps less need to look over his shoulder and wear a gum-guard).

Despite this, I think we score pretty well on the leadership section. Obviously there is room for improvement, but we’re doing ok. I have noticed before that we do seem to have the ‘window and the mirror trait’. Leaders should:

…point to the window to people and factors other than themselves to give credit for success. When confronted with failures, they look in the mirror and say, “I am responsible”

I certainly always blame myself for failures and I don’t think I take all the credit when things go right

One area in this section that we score lower on is that of ‘cultivating leaders’. In our defence, we only just took on our most recent hires - until which point, the directors numbered half of the company! Give us some time on this one…

I think it would be pure hubris to say that we are great leaders at this stage, but I think all we can ask for is that we might be on our way to becoming such.

First who, then what

A middling score for Distilled on hiring great people and getting out of their way. We score quite poorly on having a very rigourous recruitment process (see upcoming post about our new employees). Despite this, we have ended up with an awesome team - of whom I am very proud. In terms of giving people the freedom to define their role, I think we are gradually getting more comfortable with this and are doing a better job recently - Tom in particular has a lot of freedom to define his own role and I think our newest hires are getting a lot of input into how their work is structured and what is a priority. Also, some of the questions in this section relate to ‘getting people off the bus’ - something that Duncan and I have no recent first-hand experience of (thankfully).

Confront the brutal facts

We have a lot of room for improvement here, and beat ourselves up about it constantly. I think we actually do pretty well at collecting data about how well our business is doing, and we certainly have the skills to analyse it! The biggest problem I find is that it never becomes my top priority to analyse the data and so I end up steering the business based on gut feel and half-analysed numbers far far too often.

A lot of successful people have told me that the people they most admire know their businesses inside and out at any instant. You could grab them in the pub and they would be able to tell you the last week’s sales figures, margins on their main products, cash in the bank, capacity in the various teams in their business, how the pipeline is looking and other key performance indicators at the drop of a hat. I aspire to having this kind of data at my fingertips. I think we are getting better gradually, but we have an awfully long way to go before we could even think of calling ourselves ‘great’ at it.

The hedgehog concept

Uh oh. This is our Achilles heel. I thought we had a pretty good idea what we were good at until I realised that I tend to start a list and keep going - we can sometimes have a bit of a scatter-gun approach to doing everything at once. We really need to get better at concentrating on core strengths. Our core strengths need to satisfy being something:

1. that we can be the best in the world at
2. that we enjoy doing
3. that makes us money

I actually think that with some of the tools we have in the pipeline, that the area we focus on might well be tools to help people manage their reputations, marketing and advertising online (as well as helping clients use these tools). I’d quite like to head in that direction and I do think we have potential to be best in the world if we define our niches well. I hope we get better at this (but I hope we keep the sense of playfulness we have at the moment where we try crazy, wacky new ideas sometimes just to see if they work!).

I think my personal biggest challenge over the next 6-12 months is to define our focus and steer the business in the best possible direction. I feel personally responsible for getting this bit right - and I think that the rewards for getting it right could be huge.

A culture of discipline

As covered above, I don’t think we are all that good at staying disciplined at concentrating on our ‘hedgehog’ (or even defining it well!), but we do pretty well at the rest the discipline areas. I felt a real affinity with the concept of hiring self-disciplined people and removing barriers to discipline, and hiring self-motivated people and removing barriers to motivation. I think this is perfect for our management style (in as much as we aren’t huge disciplinarians or rah-rah cheerleading motivators). As I mentioned before, we’ll be talking more soon about our recent hires, but I think they fit into these definitions very well.

One angle that Rand covered in his write-up was the ‘above-and-beyond’ nature of SEOmoz where they all seem to be blogging / answering emails etc. at all hours of the day. We have never had much of a long hours culture (he says, writing this post at 10.30pm…!) and I would like to build a business where our employees can contribute as much as they want, but also lead a life outside the office that doesn’t feel tethered to email or their computer screen. This isn’t in any way a criticism of the mozzers (I certainly work well outside office hours as I said) but I do think there is another element of discipline which relates to maintaining a balance even when the opportunities are exciting and right in front of your nose. I’m not always very good at this, but I am trying to build a company that is better at it than I am.

Beer o’clock on Friday afternoons. A ‘creative’ area (in the new office, when we finally move in) with beanbags etc. to get away from staring at computer screens all the time. Other ideas we haven’t thought of yet. I think that all of these things are areas where we are creating a culture of discipline in the best possible sense - i.e. removing barriers to discipline and motivation for our self-motivated and self-disciplined employees.

The flywheel

An up-and-coming score for us in this section. We definitely understand the benefits of growing the momentum of the business with everything we do (and I think it is sometimes easy to forget how far we have come). I don’t think we have anything like the momentum we want yet, but while we should continue spinning the flywheel as hard as we can, we also need to have some patience and remember that none of it is magic - but rather that as we continue focussing on the job at hand, if we do our job right, then we will build up some crazy momentum on our flywheel.

As we get to this stage, the momentum should build quicker and quicker, which will make it easier and easier to do new things and launch new ideas (remembering to stick to what we know best of course!).

I’ve been a bit behind with my reading and have only just got to an article in Business Week entitled Who Needs the Ivies which asks whether top universities (the ‘Ivies’ in the title - meaning the Ivy League universities in the US - which the author bundles with other powerhouses such as MIT and Stanford) discourage entrepreneurship by tending towards risk-aversion and the continuation of the status quo.

I find this interesting (partly because I was at Cambridge, Tom was at Warwick and Duncan was at Glasgow - each of which are great universities). We have entrepreneurial ambitions - and this isn’t the first suggestion that our educations could potentially actually be a hindrance. I was struck while reading Rachel Bridge’s book how I made it how many of the case studies were about people who hadn’t been to university (many left school before A levels).

In some ways, there is a reporting bias at work here - sometimes the most interesting case studies are those where the subject has overcome particular difficulties.

I suspect that the truth is somewhat more complicated - I don’t know whether higher education is an indicator of likely entrepreneurial success or not, but I do think that it is probably a smaller factor than a lot of other things.

Maybe it is rare to have a combination of entrepreneurial drive and the kind of analytical approach to things that gets you a degree in computer science or maths from a top university. But I guess what we are hoping is that we have that combination, and that when it happens, it’s really powerful.

Here’s hoping.

There are many, many people who are better (and more committed) at round-up-type posts than I am. I barely remember to check my email some days, so making sure I round up the news in a sector or keeping our readers up to date with a particular field is probably not a good role for me.

Nevertheless, I quite often find myself with interesting links that I want to share (even without much commentary) so you never know, this might become a sequence of posts (I was going to write ’series’ of posts, but as Jon will be able to tell you(*), a sequence and a series are very different things - sometimes I can’t keep my inner geek under control!). Anyway, to the links:

• Joel writes a fantastic piece on the parallels between current ajax thinking and the PC world pre-windows. If you don’t read Joel and you claim to write any kind of code, what are you thinking? I particularly like his reference to ycombinator - I love what they are doing. That’s what I would like to do if I were rich…
• The Guardian writes about Google stopping the kickback to agencies for PPC advertising. I think this can only be a good thing for smaller PPC advertisers - typically their agencies won’t be subsidising their campaigns with a Google kickback and so it levels the playing field between them and the big boys
• And finally, a quick descent into the slightly less relevant / high-brow. I was wondering through the world of lolcats (as you have to do while enjoying a curry and a pint in front of your computer) and it struck me how highbrow some of them really are: Fugucat needs knowledge of the poisonous Fugu fish and its liver, i can fix thiz is a simple visual joke but there is quite a lot more going on - the cat is trying to log in as root, for one…

Anyway. The lolcats is probably off-topic, but the other links are good. I blame Tom.

(*) sorry. Inside joke. Not even a very funny one.

I wrote yesterday about problems I was having with Google website optimizer.

Within hours, I had received a personal email from the product manager for website optimizer at Google asking if I was still having problems and if I could help him reproduce them in order to look into it.

This is perfect reputation management from Google (we have seen that they are good at this in the past). As a result, I have updated yesterday’s post - I hope whatever the underlying problem was, it doesn’t cause long-term issues.

The system itself seems to be working perfectly for us - once I finally got it working.

You know that classic ThinkGeek t-shirt ‘Go away or I will replace you with a very small shell script’? Well I think replacing grunt work with work done by a computer is a fantastic thing.

Converting a spreadsheet from the format output by AdWords to the format required by MSN AdCenter is a classic example of such a task - and I probably should have automated it the first time I had to do it. I have only just got round to it, however, but we are happy to be able to present (as far as we know) the only automatic Google AdWords to MSN AdCenter converter.

We have made this available for download for only £29.99

We hope this makes your job easier. If you have any questions or comments, we’d love to hear them - please email us at support@distilled.co.uk and let us know what you would like to see next!

If you find that in addition to the technical details of converting campaigns, you are also in need of strategic advice or ongoing campaign management, we also offer PPC management services.

Differences between Google AdWords and MSN AdCenter

In a lot of ways, Microsoft’s AdCenter offering has a lot to recommend it (I have written before about my support for an AdCenter qualification and pretty much my only frustration which is with the interface). It would be massively helped by an easy to use equivalent of the AdWords Editor (most of the software that allows the management of campaigns across multiple platforms is relatively expensive), but the traffic that is available is very high quality in our experience.

Conversion rates can be much higher than equivalent AdWords campaigns. Traffic has traditionally been much lower (often too low to make it worthwhile in the UK) but the volume is enough to make it worthwhile in many markets in the US. Given the conversion benefits, it would be nice for many advertisers if the introduction of Microsoft Vista were to lead to an increased market share for MSN / Live search (especially in the UK).

Andy wants to know why I read Marketing Pilgrim. OK. Not just why I read it, but why any of us read it…

I read MP for the following main reasons (in no particular order):

• Along with Search Engine Land (whose daily digest I subscribe to), MP gives me a fair bit of confidence that I will catch anything really important going on in our industry (see below for my daily reading)
• I like the tone and style of Andy’s writing as well as his contributors’
• Andy published one of our articles what seems like ages ago
• Andy dropped into Distilled HQ when he was in the UK earlier in the year to do some consulting work for us and I like to keep up with people I have met in real life!
• Every so often, Andy does things like give away money for writing stuff like this (kidding - that falls very low on my motivation for reading - I think the hourly wage would kinda suck!)

I have a lot of blogs in my feed reader, but I’m not religious about keeping up with them. When I am very busy (which seems to be all the time, these days, in a good way) I try to make certain that I keep up with the SEL digest (because it tells me all the news), SEOmoz (because I enjoy the mozzers’ writing and perspective, I like them and because I enjoy the community and commenting there) and Marketing Pilgrim (because, well, see above). Oh, and Scott Adams’ blog - the creator of Dilbert (because it’s brilliant - seriously, go and subscribe now).

[Update: the product manager at Google contacted me and the problem does appear to be fixed (whether as a result of that or not, I don’t know). The system also seems to be working pretty well….!]

I am trying to get Google website optimizer up and running in order to run a simple A/B split test on our website (and also to gain valuable experience of how the system works in order to be able to advise clients on it in the future).

I’m sure it is a fantastic system when you eventually get it up and running (and I’ve mentioned before how I am a bit of a stats junkie), but when every time I try to get further through the process, I get a message saying:

Google website optimizer is unavailable

It turned out, though that in fact the process was working - each time I got that message it had actually progressed further through the setup process (i.e. the button press had in fact worked). So when I logged back into AdWords and went into website optimizer, it was at the next stage.

It might be a slow way of getting something like this set up, but at least it did work in the end…

Have you ever received an email or seen a model which promises you a free (or more often, cheap) product simply by getting your friends to sign up to the program? It’ll typically go something like this:

Sign up today for just £20, and you can start straight away! All you need to do is get 20 friends to sign up to our program and we’ll ship you a free iPhone! (replace iPhone with other highly desirable item)

Now, while undoubtedly a lot of people fall for this it’s not a sensible model and CANNOT work long term. While it’s fine for the early adopters, (i.e. those at the top of the food chain) very very quickly you need the entire population of the planet to sign up before everyone is satisfied. This kind of scam is called a pyramid scheme and is typically illegal (wiki).

If you take away the up-front payment to join, it becomes more like a multi-level-marketing (wiki) system. These are not illegal if run correctly, but their success is heavily biased towards the people at the top of the pyramid. Blogrush is just such a scheme . Sure, the early adopters (Shoemoney, Andy Beal, John Chow, Problogger, etc etc) will benefit from the scheme as it has it’s initial popularity and everyone thinks it’s a cool idea.

Very quickly, however, the model falls apart. Let’s see why:

Let’s say I see Shoemoney’s article on Blogrush, think it’s a great idea and install the widget on my blog. Now, after a small amount of time (and a little self promotion) some of my friends install Blogrush on their sites.

Let’s say Shoemoney is Blog A, Distilled is Blog B, and my friend’s blog is blog C.

A very simple equation emerges.

1 page view on blog C => 1 blogrush display for blog C + 1 blogrush display for blog B + 1 blogrush display for blog A.

So, when you take this 10 levels deep (which is as far as the affiliate nature continues):

1 display of a blogrush widget => need for 10 links from blogrush widgets

Now, each widget can display 5 links, but that still means we need more links from blogrush widgets than there are widgets to display widgets on.

However, I have been a bit sneaky in the analysis above - assuming that everyone with a blogrush widget signed up as an affiliate to someone higher up the pyramid. This may well be (close to) true once you get a bit further down the list, but early on, it’s certainly not true - some of the early sign-ups with the largest traffic may not have signed up via an affiliate (or at least, they are within 10 links of the top of the tree). So, while we can assume that there are very high-traffic blogs within 10 links of your blog, the system should work (it can use excess inventory from them to display lower affiliates’ blogrush views), but once you get below that level, these assumptions go out the window, and what happens then is anyone’s guess.

Now, I’ve no idea how quickly the system reaches this tipping point but I suspect it won’t be long. Especially given the sheer volume of hits across this network (which is going to grow now that this widget is in place!).

So my prediction? I’m staying away from Blogrush. I see a flaw in their model which they take no steps to address (their FAQ and about pages are pretty bare at the moment) and I can’t see this network becoming a long term thing. The big boys will use it, they’ll profit from it and then all the smaller blogs and people who sign up through affiliate links won’t get their share of views on the Blogrush network and they’ll uninstall the widget which in turn will severely limit the network and will cause the whole thing to fall apart.

Maybe I’ll be wrong, maybe it’ll be a successful but until I’m proved otherwise or until someone gives me a convincing argument dispelling my MLM concerns I’m not adopting.

As a footnote, this is a classic case of poor reputation mangement for Blogrush. Not only because I’m blogging about it but more importantly because there is a fundamental issue with their product which they have not addressed. By not addressing the issue they look shady in my eyes and hence I’m not adopting and there will be plenty of people like me.

I have written before about how I think Google ought to include real search queries in the paid search monitoring. Today, while looking at some reports for a client with Tom, I realised that there is an even bigger reason for wanting this - above not wanting to have to go to the AdWords search queries report.

At present, Google Analytics links nicely with AdWords - displaying cost and conversion data in a nice way. Unfortunately, this means that the Analytics definition of a PPC ‘keyword’ (which is the phrase you are bidding on, which triggered the advert, rather than the actual phrase the searcher used) is different to the Analytics definition of a natural search ‘keyword’ (which is the actual phrase searched - often much longer-tail).

Therefore, if you are broad- or phrase-matching in AdWords, and you look at a report such as the ‘keywords’ report that allows three options: ‘total’, ‘paid’ and ‘non-paid’, you get a really easy to read report that isn’t telling you the whole truth. Tom and I were looking at the analytics data for a client who ranks #2 in the natural results for ‘keyword’ and also buys broad-match AdWords advertising on keyword (with quite a lot of negative-match terms). This leads to a strange set of numbers:

• When you look at ‘total’ traffic for that keyword, you see a few thousand visitors a day
• When you restrict it to ‘paid’ traffic for that keyword, you still see about 5/6 of the traffic
• When you restrict it to ‘non-paid’ traffic, you see 500-600 visitors a day

Initially we thought “that’s strange - ranking #2, we’d expect to see at least comparable natural and paid traffic levels” but then we realised that we are comparing entirely different things. Non-paid traffic is only for that exact keyword (and longer-tail phrases are listed separately) while paid traffic lists anything under that bid.

Each of these behaviours is sensible in isolation, but if they are going to work differently, then my opinion is that they shouldn’t be displayed in the same report - and there shouldn’t be a ‘total’ (i.e. paid and non-paid) option for keywords - it doesn’t really make any sense.

I would far rather see one report which compares like with like for paid and non-paid (this is the real search queries report I’ve asked for before) along with a separate ‘PPC’ report that includes cost and conversion data as normally displayed in the AdWords control panel.